The federal government has closed fewer than 1 percent of the nearly 300,000 deportation cases in its docket since kicking off a program last August to evaluate and remove people from the deportation queue who were not a high priority for deportation, researchers from Syracuse Universityís Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse found. The initiative was announced as a means to further prioritize enforcement resources and loosen up the heavy backlog of cases in immigration courts. Yet in the last year, the backlog has actually increased, to 305,556 cases.